Do you have a Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo account? If so hackers may have YOUR password

HACKERS have stolen hundreds of millions of usernames and passwords for Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, it has been claimed.

Security experts have found a total of 272.3million hacked usernames and passwords up for sale in the Russian underworld.

And for people using Russia’s biggest email service, Mail.ru, it gets worse, with more than half the accounts allegedly up for sale.

It is one of the biggest stashes of stolen credentials to be uncovered since cyber attacks hit major US banks and retailers two years ago.

Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of online firm Hold Security, said his firm’s researchers had found a stash of login details after a Russian hack bragged about them on a forum

The cache is claimed to contain nearly 57m Mail.ru accounts - a big chunk of the 64m monthly active email users Mail.ru said it had at the end of last year.

It also is believed to include tens of millions of usernames and passwords for the world's three big email providers - Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo, plus hundreds of thousands of accounts at German and Chinese email providers.

And worryingly they were put on sale for 50 roubles - or just over 50p.

"When forced to change one, the chances are that the new password will be similar to the old one. Attackers can exploit this weakness. The new password may have been used elsewhere, and attackers can exploit this too," it warns.

"The new password is also more likely to be written down, which represents another vulnerability. New passwords are also more likely to be forgotten, and this carries the productivity costs of users being locked out of their accounts, and service desks having to reset passwords."